Memorandom re: How Much Law Review is Going to Suck

To: New Associate Editors
From: Editor-in-Chief of Law Review
Re: Your sucky new life on law review
______________________________________________

Welcome, minions! We are all very excited to have you join the journal, to force you to do all the work we hated doing last year. You should be very proud that the journal accepted you, an achievement that has either been your lifelong dream or a thing you learned about your 1L year and decided to do because everyone else was doing it. Here are a few things you should prepare for in the next year.

I know that you will be going on “interviews” and “call-backs” this semester, and I just wanted to let you know that “I don’t care.” Hey, I did it last year, and I didn’t complain at all. You know who else probably didn’t complain about his busy schedule? Barack Obama. I don’t mean to compare myself to the President too much, but we are both Editors-in-Chief of our respective Law Reviews, and I will probably write a book after I graduate. Just take comfort that when you show your resume to a potential employer, he might ask, “Why didn’t you join a journal,” allowing you to direct him to the single line on your resume that denotes the activity that is currently ruining your life.

The work will be challenging, but it will give you a wonderful glimpse into the world of legal academia. You will find an assertion, such as “Supreme Court cases are important,” and be charged with the task of proving it with the professor’s citation: See, generally, The New York Times. Or maybe he will decide to prove his assertion using a law review article from 1963 because that’s the last time he was a member of a journal and it’s been sitting on his desk since, and now you have to walk across campus in the snow to find the library that has microfilms because that’s easier than asking the author for a copy. This is a rite of passage. Remember, Barack Obama did it too!

I know you did some work with the Bluebook when you were a 1L, which is great because none of that Bluebooking was relevant experience for this kind of Bluebooking. Sorry? It’s great, though! You will learn the difference between an italicized comma and an un-italicized comma, and how that will be the only edit you can make to your resume or your cousin’s personal statement for her law school applications. Also, you will stop encouraging your cousin to go to law school.

I know you got into this journal game because you want to clerk or become a professor or an associate at a top firm. That seems to only be guaranteed for me, but you still have a small chance of being published or even being the next Editor-in-Chief. You just must put in the work to make the machine run before you can achieve a higher level within the organization. I know what you’re thinking, and no, journal membership IS NOT A PYRAMID SCHEME.

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If only there were female dominatri in the law review that look like this! Unfortunately, the ones I remember from law review made Rosie O’Donnell look like Miss U.S.A. (Donald Trump aside).

Yes, the female law review editors (if you could call them that) were actually quite repulsive, and since they spent nearly all of their free time in the law review office, they rarely found the time to bathe, making them very STANKY when they did decide to come into class.